You could always just use google documents instead of open office, and they come with their own free storage.

I found this article interesting, but I was disturbed slightly by this line: "where a MySpace page takes the place of your obituary"... excuse me, what obituary is this?

Sadly, most people are not going to get their picture in the NYT. I have always found it deeply depressing to see the endless rows of tiny-typed obituaries in any but the smallest town's newspaper, knowing that for many of those names that will be their only memorial, and the vast majority of the people who might still know them, even if they glance at the page (even if they buy the paper that day) may not see their name.

Parents & relatives often don't really know their teenagers. The fact that they can at least in the end find out what their kids really (or at least publicly) thought, talked like, enjoyed & everything else is probably both upsetting and in some way healing.

It's a shame about the insensitivity of some of the gawkers, but as other posters have noted, not a particularly unusual shame. I don't think this should overshadow the way in which it's wonderful that there is something creative left of a person, some kind of self expression that everyone can see.

Though I'm sure a lot of parents & friends would prefer to have something more easily idealized. Another fascinating consequence of the information age -- information about our intimate acquaintances.

This is not the madness of just one irresponsible person. Nor, as much as I'd like to, can I blame the 5% of Americans who want Israel to exist because they think it facilitates the second coming. I blame the party operatives who allowed a madman who'd bankrupted several companies and one state to be their candidate for president, just because they thought he could win. Individuals like Cheney saw an opportunity to push through their own warped agendas (e.g. all-powerful executives, reinventing the military, democratising the Middle East). But there are always lots of ambitious & intelligent conservatives with more sensible goals. How could the party itself let this man anywhere near the ballot? The Republican party operatives are as guilty of the hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties so far as Bush is himself. The US is to powerful of a toy to hand over to someone of questionable competence just so you can get your personal tax break or whatever.

A long while ago, you used to allow letters to be posted with any name. So, some letters I published under my real name, because they conformed to my professional identity & I thought that identity might be useful. But mostly, Salon is a hobby for me, and I use it to say what I really think, not things carefully phrased to keep me out of trouble with my colleagues and coworkers.

Since Salon implemented the "show all the letters by XXX" feature in a clumsy way that ignored what naming you were using, I had to give up publishing under my real name altogether. Except when I write to real newspapers.

And now, if I publish something I think might identify myself to someone in my field, or that I want to email to someone after I've posted it, I publish it anonymously, so my peers can't trace my identity back to my other letters.

This is stupid, but I guess it's the consequence of trolls.

If you get rid of anonymous posting, you'll get rid of the letters on the topics I know most about. How ironic! But ultimately, probably less important than the trolls.

I'm an academic who somehow wound up at one of the "rural" universities. While I support your widening-access theory of the Internet, I resent the implication that we unfortunates can only publish through collaboration with someone somewhere "good". One of the main differences between small & large universities is the library. Only not anymore. Even three years ago I was asking my friends from Oxford & Harvard (& using my old account at MIT) to get articles not available in my library. Not anymore --- my university library has bought all kinds of electronic access at increasingly cheap rates, and Google makes it increasingly easy to find copies of preprints on line. This is the point of publication and peer review -- you don't need to know someone to know what they've learned.

Speaking of Google, people who've never heard of you don't decide to read your papers entirely by what university they are from. They mostly decide by how well your text matched their keyword search. So this is another widening of access -- the ability to search for quality publications based on semantic content instead of crude labels. Though this of course goes back to peer review. But in my experience, Google access to preprints can lead to better publications as more experienced authors find and assist novices with the right ideas.

Another consequence of the Internet's advances in communication is that people aren't afraid to leave the big universities & go somewhere beautiful & rural, maybe even foreign. As long as the students are good enough.

If Al Gore hadn't been so completely incapable of dealing with Clinton having an affair with someone the age of his (Gore's) daughters, then we wouldn't have had to campaign for Lieberman in 2000. I hated doing that. I didn't want a religious nut-case like that anywhere near the White House. I'm not sure he isn't worse than Bush. If only Gore had picked Edwardson...

Before someone complains -- atheist/agnostic/no belief was the fastest growing category in terms of percentage-of-Americans increase, from 8.4% in 1990 to 15.0% in 2001. Some other tiny religions tripled their number of adherents, but still make up less than 1% of the population.